Spring Cleaning Purge #2: Clothing and Accessories

The next area of the house I tackled was my clothing. My side of the closet was overflowing. My dresser was stuffed to the point of breaking, and under the bed was 3 of the large underbed plastic storage containers full of clothing. That is just too much to handle. My boyfriend has a small dresser and a smaller section of closet, yet has everything he needs. I want to have less.

So out everything came from all of its hiding places; the bedroom closet, the spare closet, under the bed, the dresser drawers. I made a HUGE pile in the bedroom. The pic doesn't even do it justice as the whole queen size bed was covered, plus stuff was still inside the plastic bins.

I tackled the hanging clothes first. I had already pared down a good amount of those when we moved a year ago, so I decided not to get rid of anything. As my career future is up in the air, I am hanging onto a lot of dressier clothes that I rarely wear, but would be perfect for an office job. If it turns out I can't work, then I can go through them again. As for the rest, I tried on a lot of my wardrobe. If it didn't fit or I didn't like the fit, it went away, easy as that.

I had a lot of duplicates or extremely similar items. Somehow I acquired over 10 blankets (including 2 snuggies). He also has his blankets he likes. As we live in NH and the winters can get cold, and we don't have a generator, we do need a few more blankets than the average household, but more than 10 is a bit excessive. I got rid of 6 of them (including the 2 snuggles).

After all was said and done, I had 3 big garbage bags full, 2 medium garbage bags, and a small bag of winter accessories to donate. I also had 2 out of 3 underbed plastic storage bins completely empty, as well as a large stack of shoebox sized plastic storage empty. Freedom!

I used to keep many seasonal clothes under the bed as there was no longer room in my dresser drawers, but between getting rid of items I never wore or didn't like, I was able to put all except my middle of summer clothes in the drawers!

As part of the Konmari method mentioned in a previous post, folding is an important part of the organizational process. Now, when I open my drawers, I can see everything I have in that drawer at a glance. It's great! I know exactly what I have and I won't just grab one of the same couple of shirts from the top of the pile.

Let's hope that I can keep it this way!